Inform, Educate, Implode

This week: one weird trick to combat bias at the BBC! Also: what’s the largest local authority in England; and the ballad of Nim Chimpsky.

It’s a sign of the siloisation of our media and the end of consensus reality that I hadn’t even noticed the scandal about bias at the BBC until Sunday night, when the Director General and Chief Executive of News unexpectedly resigned. I can only assume it was playing out on Twitter, which I’ve long ceased to read for roughly the same reason I try not to touch toilets with my bare hands.¹

The most obvious reading of outgoing DG Tim Davie’s resignation letter is that after five years – after Lineker and Wallace and that Gaza documentary and heaven knows what else – he’d simply had enough of being the fall guy every time anything went wrong anywhere in one of the world’s largest media corporations (or worse, every time one of its almost infinite number of enemies decided something had gone wrong).

On Monday morning’s Today programme, though, Nick Robinson reported that “friends of” Robbie Gibb – we all know what that means – said the non-exec board member had been shocked because, furious as he was about “liberal” “bias”, Gibb didn’t see why Davie actually had to go. That to me suggests an alternative explanation. Perhaps Davie decided that, on balance, if the choice was between giving up a high profile and lucrative role or continuing to work with Robbie Gibb – a monstrous creation, who quite openly conflates lack of bias with sharing his bias and has been credibly accused of interfering in both the news agenda and hiring decisions – he quite understandably decided he’d rather be out on the dole every time.

Now there are noisy calls for Gibb to go too, led by LibDem leader Ed Davey but echoed within the corporation, too. Good.

Because it seems abundantly clear at this stage that, whatever mistakes have been made at the Beeb, the real threat to its editorial independence isn’t left-wing group think but right-wing pressure. Sure, the misleading editing of that Trump documentary is hard to defend (though it was made by an outside production company and precisely no complaints were received). But the litany of complaints in Michael Prescott’s leaked memo warning of BBC bias is just a laundry list of the sort of the whinges that fill up that right-wing social media site I don’t read any more: that it’s anti-Trump, anti-Israel, too positive about immigrants, trans people and asylum seekers. (Citation very f*cking needed on that one.) Equally valid claims that could be made for bias on the other side – not least that Nigel Farage is so inescapable that he’s about three days from being named the new host of Strictly – did not feature.

It’s hard to imagine all this happening if the BBC had misleadingly edited a left-wing figure in the same way. As David Yelland – a former editor of the Sun! – has said, this feels a lot like a coup, an attempt by the right to exert pressure on an institution that is officially supposed to be immune to such things. And the presence of Gibb on the board means a large chunk of that pressure is coming from inside the house.

As a former head of comms in Theresa May’s Downing Street and an advisor to GB News, it is extremely hard to claim that Gibb’s apparent veto on BBC policy is compatible with a desire to combat bias. But as he’s made no secret of either his own views or his desire to propagate them, it is extremely unclear that a “lack of bias” is his true concern. That, to me, suggests that any attempt to shame him into quitting may be doomed. He doesn’t feel ashamed. He thinks he’s justified.

So the government has an opportunity here to show that they, unlike the right, really do care about impartiality, and remove a damaging irritant in the process: sack him, and replace him with someone less politically contentious. Gibb may or may not be capable of feeling shame – but he is surely capable of being fired.

Where’s the largest local authority in England?

I was reading this excellent New World piece by Ed Jennings about how Reform’s take over of Kent County Council is going – worth your time if you want some sense of the competent and in-fighting free management that may be coming to a national government near Westminster soon – when the following paragraph leapt out at me:

“The video was leaked on a Saturday. There were suspensions on Monday, and by the end of the week two councillors had been expelled. The leak turned an uneasy situation into something approaching a Reform party civil war. Kent County Council, the largest local authority in England, became the stage for the collapse of the party that promised to restore order.”

The thing that made me sit up was not, in fact, the shocking revelation that Reform politicians don’t play well together. (They don’t seem to like anyone else, there’s very little reason that they’d all like each other.) No, the surprise was something that wasn’t about the party at all.

Largest? Kent? Surely that can’t be right.

The line, Ed told me, is one Kent County Council frequently uses to describe itself, so we can probably assume it’s not been pulled from nowhere? But the reason it threw me is because of another line I’ve read so often down the years that it’s started to feel like a stock phrase, like “great offices of state”, “tanks on Labour’s lawn” or – this for a different sort of nerd – “Yartek, leader of the alien Voord”.

That line is “the largest local authority in Europe”, and it isn’t used to describe Kent at all: instead, it refers to Birmingham City Council. But since Birmingham was also, last I checked, in England, and since England remains a part of Europe despite Reform’s clearly stated policy preferences, it feels like both statements can’t be true: the largest local authority in Europe is not necessarily in England, but the largest local authority in England is necessarily, Nigel Farage notwithstanding, in Europe.

So what is going on?

For reasons of literary convenience, let’s take those two claims in reverse order. Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of local authorities in England by population. Look who it is: